Today, people commonly book trip reservations online. For example, a person may access an online travel reservation service, such as Expedia.com™, to reserve basic items such as a hotel room, airline tickets, and a rental car, which are necessary for people to get to and from the destination, and stay at the destination during the trip. For these common elements of travel, most online travel reservation systems have electronic interfaces to service providers to book and reconcile the reservation. In addition to basic travel components, people typically want to reserve additional products, services or activities, which are not directly related to the travel or room accommodations. For example, a person may want to purchase lift tickets to a ski resort, reserve a sight-seeing tour, or tickets to a live show. Historically, the processes and systems used to reserve additional components of a trip are not served by electronic interfaces, and thus subject to risks related to data integrity, fraud, and reservation error.
Current systems are characterized by error-prone manual steps in the process of taking and making a person's reservation. For example, when the person (i.e., the guest) places a reservation for a resort through an online reservation service, an email itinerary/reservation is sent from the online reservation service to a receiving party (e.g., accounting department) at the resort. The email itinerary/reservation typically remains in an email inbox at the resort without any real attention until later when the reservation and sale are reconciled. Later, at the time of the reservation, the guest arrives at the resort and presents a paper voucher that was provided to the guest by the online reservation service. The paper voucher indicates a product that was reserved or purchased by the guest, as well as the online reservation service that was used to make the reservation. An employee (e.g., desk attendant) at the resort attempts to make a point-of-sale (POS) transaction based on the voucher.
The POS transaction involves carrying out the terms of the reservation, for example by identifying the product (e.g., sightseeing tour, ski lift ticket) represented by the paper voucher, and providing the product using the resort's sales/reservation system. In conventional systems, the employee who accepts the voucher from the guest must interpret the paper voucher in order to properly carry out the product reservation/purchase. This can be a challenging, time-consuming, error-prone task, in part because every online reservation service typically generates a voucher with a unique data format or look. In addition, the employee may often be unable to authenticate the voucher at the time of the POS transaction. As such, the employee essentially trusts the voucher's legitimacy and his interpretation of the voucher when making the POS transaction.
In addition to the POS transaction, the sale must be reconciled with the reservation that was sent earlier by the online reservation service to the resort. Accordingly, the paper voucher from the guest is typically submitted to the receiving party at the resort who originally received the itinerary/reservation from the online reservation service for reconciliation. The receiving party manually reconciles the paper voucher against the itinerary/reservation that was originally sent, and then attempts to collect payment from the online reservation service using the paper voucher. As such, conventionally, the POS transaction has been disconnected from the reservation reconciliation process. The disconnection between the POS transaction and the reconciliation introduce potential for error. In addition, the manual reconciliation process is time-consuming and error-prone.